Dwindle

I woke from that horrifying dream in a frenzy of sweat and cold fever. My first and most terrifying thought was that I had somehow contracted Undeath and was slowly deteriorating from it. But I knew this not to be true for I smelled my own mat. I was home.

  I heard noises above me but my eyes blatantly refused to show their colors. It took me more than a few moments to realize this and several more to give up on the fruitless task. I shifted slightly, hardly able to move and barely to breathe. The pinching within me had stopped, but the pain in my shoulder had not gone down. I wished it would and suddenly desired more than being alive that I could return to the bliss of sleep.

  It took me long moments to finally open my eyes and watch my surroundings. Ollie was in the room and he seemed to be arguing heatedly with Ali and Pierce both. Paige was beside me, occasionally stroking my hair. They were so immersed in their conversation that no one realized I was awake.

  “I’m telling you!” Ollie yelled. “We can do it!”

  “And I say we can’t!” Pierce yelled back. “That is the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard! You should have killed her like we planned!”

  Ollie shifted impatiently, uncomfortably, angrily. I could tell just by his movements that he didn’t want to talk about it – his weakness, his inability to kill me.

  Then, it dawned on me. His job was to kill me. He’d gone out with me to kill me. I felt deep emotional pain at the words. Ollie had planned to kill me and now I was in pain because I had felt the need to save his stupid life. I felt real sting at that. Real hurt and anger.

  “He might be right,” Paige said beside me, closer than the others and nearly making me jump. “What if it is a bad idea? If we take her with us, the Deviants will come looking for more here. They’ll take this area. We’ll have lost it.”

  “You know just as much as I do that once they bomb this area there will be nothing left!”

  “But they’ll try, Ollie,” she said weakly. “They’ve never been so close to Freedom’s Progress before. It would be all out war.”

  “So leaving her to die is the only way?” Ollie shouted. “Can you just live with that? Can you forget?”

  “Maybe…” Paige said uncertainly. “I don’t know…”

  “How can you even say that?” Ollie said, turning away from them all.

  He was pacing. He seemed to do that often.

  “You know she’s immune! She has to be! I saw her get bitten, and she survived!”

  “You’re pathetic!” Ali shot at him loudly.

  He didn’t say anything to this.

  “She’s going to die like all the rest,” Ali said definitively. “Period. If you don’t have the stomach to shoot her in the head, I will. She’s useless, do you hear me? Useless! Her blood is useless. Her mind is useless. What she is is useless.”

  He flipped around to her.

  “I KNOW what I saw!”

  He seemed angrier than I had ever seen him, different. When it came to me, he seemed bizarrely defensive.

  “She saved my life, a human, and she risked hers to do it!” he shouted. “They went for me, and she saved me! Whatever being an Aio is, it gave her that chance! We have to take it, Ali!”

  “She could end the war!” Paige said from beside me.

  “End the war?” Ali snapped. “Who do you guys think you are? Do you really honestly believe that the war is about soldiers? About people? It’s about making sure there is one power in this world, and that’s Probe.”

  “She has a biological miracle inside of her just waiting to be discovered!” Ollie said emphatically. “They would care about that!”

  “She’d ruin their power! Are you that naïve?” Ali snorted. “If she had the cure, they’d suck it out of her and leave her in a ditch somewhere. That’s what they do. They don’t give a shit about how many of us die to keep the power in check. She’ll be lost forever, and when she saw what our world is really like, she’d turn on us like the rest of them!”

  I could not establish who they were talking about, but I knew, after brief moments, it had to still be about me. Some problems always followed me around.

  “You should have left her there to rot!” Ali finally shouted.

  “You know I can’t do that!” he said finally, as if they had been pressing him about it forever.

  “And why not?”

  “Because I owe her, dammit!”

  And then I began to understand. That was all that I was to him. Just business.

  “So you want her to die?” Ali asked mockingly. “She’ll burn slowly in a rain of fire. That’s much better than a bullet to the spinal cord.”

  Ollie made a very uncharacteristic noise, and he squeezed his hands into fists.

  “Shut up, Ali!” he shouted.

  “Why are you even pushing this?” Ali asked angrily. “You’re acting like such a pussy! What happened to you? The Exterior you were at the beginning would have been ashamed of you!”

  “I don’t care!” he shouted back. “Everything is different now. I’ve seen things…we all have. She’s not sick. That can be our bargaining chip to keep this place alive!”

  “To bargain, you have to want to bargain, Mr. Dark!” Pierce interjected tensely. “The High Council doesn’t care about us anymore. They care about the result.”

  “She’s the first Deviant in the world we’ve ever encountered that can exist next to humans!” Ollie shouted back. “Don’t you think they’d want to know about that?”

  “It isn’t our job to think, it’s our job to do!” Ali snapped back. “You should know that. And I had orders from the beginning to make sure that we do our duty, no matter the cost! This was your duty to facilitate, but you failed!”

  “So millions more in the future are going to DIE WITH HER!” Ollie yelled at the top of his lungs. “This may be the only cure we could ever get to Necrosis, and we’re going to kill it! Billions of lives could be saved by this! If not by this, then through the Deviants, which she could pacify! You don’t know her like I do! All we need is her!”

  “All we need or all you need, Dark?” Ali asked.

  He flipped around to face her and, for the first time truly, I saw how angry he could be.

  “Dark, just listen for a second…” Pierce said, trying to calm them both down. “The assassins would just kill her, if the High Council didn’t. You’re both Exteriors. You know how it is. She has no place where we live. She’d be killed immediately.”

  Ali made another disgusted noise.

  “How can you be so foolish to let a little folly like – like…her ruin your whole career? Everything you’ve worked for – wasted!”

  Ollie said nothing, but I felt it building. I’d provoked him enough times.

  “It isn’t like that,” he finally submitted.

  “Really?” Ali taunted. “Sure seems that way. Do you dream about her, Dark? Do you pine for her at night?”

  “SHUT UP!” he shouted, lunging at her, but Pierce held him back just enough to calm him down. “She isn’t like that to me!”

  Hurt, more than anything, hardened me to anger.

  “She isn’t particularly beautiful,” he snapped, yanking his arm out of Pierce’s grasp. “She isn’t particularly kind or smart. She hasn’t been altogether very special. She’s just…necessary.” This resonated with him, and he nodded. “She’s just necessary. It isn’t personal.”

  The hurt was once again replaced by anger as the last drops of trust in me fell away to a blackened heart. For an unexplainable reason, I felt betrayed by his words. A single tear moved down the side of my face to my neck. No one noticed. Or cared.

  But the others didn’t buy it.

  “Oliver Dark,” Ali said, “I am stripping you of your command effectively immediately. I will assume your role as head of the expeditionary team, and you will take orders from me, got it?”

  Having realized that he’d lost, he leaned back, close to me, his hands on his temples.

  “Fine,” he eventually spat. “But we are
not going to touch her. Do you got it?”

  Ali pursed her lips, smirking.

  “We’ll see,” she finally said.

  They left together as Ollie sat near me, sighing with a heaviness that stirred deep feelings in me. He had a limp in one of his legs somewhat, from where he had fallen to the ground beside me, I would imagine. It was true luck or pure fate that he had survived the assault and not been attacked, but I was too sore at him to even care.